Palm Readers

Rick Robb believes his students at River Hill High School in
Clarksville, Maryland, have seen the future of education—and
it’s the size of a sandwich.

In a recent English class, his students fished small, hand-held iPAQ
computers out of their backpacks and set them on their desks. Turning
on the devices, the kids instantly connected to an electronic network
controlled by a laptop on their teacher’s audiovisual equipment
cart, and Robb launched the day’s writing lesson.

The teacher told his students to examine a painting visible on their
screens: the interior of a crowded subway car. Choose a person in the
car, and write a first-person monologue of that individual’s
thoughts, he instructed. As the teenagers typed on the lightweight
keyboards they’d unfolded and connected to their iPAQ hand-helds,
Robb watched his screen to view each student’s work as it
progressed. “I said first-person point of view,” he called
out to a boy on the far side of the room.

Hand-held computing, once associated with only the most gadget-prone
teachers and businesspeople, is cropping up in classrooms all over the
country, with iPAQs by Compaq Computer Corporation, Palms by Palm Inc.,
and Visors by Handspring Inc. competing for classroom turf. More and
more school officials believe the devices, which are relatively
inexpensive compared with laptops or personal computers, are the best
way to get technology into the hands of every child. And teachers like
Robb, who have received special training in educational uses of hand-
helds, claim they open up new ways to teach.

But others are not so sure the little devices are all they’re
cracked up to be. Much like personal computers, hand-helds come with
their own set of maintenance demands, such as keeping batteries charged
and regularly transferring data to more permanent storage on desktop
computers or school servers. And in many districts, administrators have
banned hand-helds because, they say, students can use them to cheat on
tests, play noneducational games, e-mail friends, or access
inappropriate Web sites.

In one West Virginia school, for example, students downloaded
software from the Internet that enabled them to turn on the
school’s television sets with their hand-held computers’
wireless technology. The kids pulled pranks for several days before a
teacher caught on.

Josh Barron, a history and geography teacher at Stagg High School in
Orland Park, Illinois, acknowledges that the gadgets can cause
distractions. “The games are an issue,” he says. “You
have to be careful.”

But, he argues, acting as a computer cop from time to time is worth
the benefits. “The kids who do have Palms get more into their
homework,” he says. “They do it on the Palms and beam it to
me; you eliminate paper, eliminate notebooks.” He notes that
students who struggle in school seem particularly to like
hand-helds.

And the devices allow the teacher to draw students into learning in
exciting ways. For example, last year in a history class,
Barron’s students built a fantasy stock portfolio starting with
$5,000 in fake money. They used their hand-helds daily to check stock
prices on the Web and typed reports on their folding keyboards.

So are hand-held computers set to become a staple in 21st-century
classrooms? That probably depends on how well they compare or combine
with other emerging technologies, experts say.

A serious challenger to palm-size computing is the new generation of
electronic books, which have larger screens that are more suitable for
diagrams and paragraphs of text, says Carole Inge, executive director
of the Institute for Teaching Through Technology and Innovative
Practices, in South Boston, Virginia. A software designer, Inge has
worked with seven-by- seven-inch e-book formats and three-by-three-inch
Palm screens, and, she says, hand-held computers’ diminutive size
is a drawback when it comes to virtual reality and other
multimedia.

On a Palm, she explains, “I’ve got a spider, and I can
look at it three dimensionally, but if I want to look at the spider in
an ecosystem, the screen size is too small.”

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